Requiem for an Assassin

I put my hands down to shove away from him, and my right fingers touched cold metal. The gun. I grabbed it and kicked away to create a precious extra two feet, then got it out in front of me with my right hand, my left still massaging my abdomen. I drew an inch of breath. Then another. The red dots disappeared, and the darkness retreated.

Hilger saw the gun, saw that he couldn’t reach me. His body sagged and he dropped the knife in the mud.

We sat there like that, neither of us able to move. After a few moments, Hilger laughed and said, “I guess you are bulletproof, after all. Body armor, right?”

I didn’t answer. I was still working on getting my breath back.

We sat there like that for almost a minute, neither of us able to move. When I could finally speak, I sighted down the muzzle and said, “Tell me how to disarm it.”

He smiled. “Then you haven’t yet. You were lying.”

“I don’t know. Somebody’s been working on it. Tell me, and I’ll let you live.”

He laughed.

I thought about calling Boaz. But without Hilger’s cooperation, there was nothing I could do to help him. And a phone call could distract him at a delicate moment. I would have to wait.

“Who are you working for?” I asked. “AQ? Hamas? Hezbollah?”

He laughed again.

“What?” I said.

“I work for my country.”

“I don’t get it.”

He sighed. “Someone has to deny America’s enemies their funding, Rain. How can the country prevail against radical Islam while simultaneously underwriting it?”

“What does this have to do with Rotterdam?”

“It has everything to do with Rotterdam. America’s oil addiction is a sickness that’s killing the patient. Christ, Americans would rather send soldiers to war than carpool to work. And Congress is worse. The idiots actually proposed to offer taxpayers a hundred-dollar rebate to buy more gasoline-they want to give the addicts more money for a fix, more money to send to the mullahs and the al Saud, our enemies.”

“So Rotterdam is an inoculation.”

“Yes. That’s well put. You increase the price of oil enough to lower demand and create market incentives for alternatives, but not so much that the patient goes into the shock of economic depression. It’s a shame the patient doesn’t have the sense or the will to inoculate himself through a carbon tax, but denial is the nature of addiction, and doesn’t change the fact that the patient badly needs help.”

“What about British Petroleum, then? Prudhoe Bay?”

He looked at me. “How do you know about that?”

“What difference does it make?”

There was a pause, and I thought he would refuse. But I’d told him I might let him live. No matter how tough you are, in extremis, it doesn’t take much for a drop of hope to blossom into a full-blown mirage of salvation.

“Prudhoe Bay was a test of the new treatment,” he said. “On the one hand, it was a failure because it didn’t have the desired effect. But it was successful, too, because it demonstrated that for the patient to get well a higher dose was needed. There were other possibilities, including Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia. But…”

“You had an unwitting access agent in Rotterdam. Boezeman.”

“That’s right. And I wanted to keep casualties to a minimum. The layout at Rotterdam is good for that.”

“So with Rotterdam inoperable…”

“Right. The price of oil would spike, demand would slacken, and I would single-handedly have hastened the advent of a post-oil, post-OPEC world economy. You get it now? Do you understand what’s at stake? We live in perilous times. We’re battling a new kind of enemy. An enemy that can’t be deterred. What do we do to fight him? Become like him?”

“Haven’t you?”

“I didn’t say ‘me.’ I said ‘we.’ Someone has to do what needs to be done, Rain. Someone has to live in the shadows so others can enjoy the light. Someone has to sin so others can enjoy i

I didn’t say anything. The only thing you’re good for. It was stupid, but the words cut into me.

“But grant me a last request,” he said. “Let me call my sister. She’s the only one I have to say goodbye to. Or is a small mercy against your code of killing?”

I watched him, the front sight of the pistol even with his forehead. I thought about how easy it is to retract a fingertip, how easy to take a life.

It had always been easy for me. What others could accomplish only with the greatest encouragement, with fear and regret and swallowed revulsion, I could just…do. And I’d kept on doing it. There would always be a reason, it seemed. And if there weren’t, maybe I would invent one.

“My mobile phone is over there,” he said, inclining his head toward the dead guy by the tree. “My knee is broken, I can’t get to it. Would you lend me yours? Please?”

What difference did it make? A small mercy, like he said. I pulled my mobile out and tossed it to him.

“Thank you,” he said. He grimaced and flipped it open with his good hand.

If I was going to stop, I had to find a way to stop, a time and place to stop. I would have to make a decision to stop. The decision would carry risks, it was true. But so, always, would the alternative.

Maybe this was what Delilah had been talking about, when she told me about choices, and how I would make the right one.

Hilger was supporting himself on his left elbow, inputting his sister’s number with his left thumb. It embarrassed me to have to hear whatever he might say to her.

Yes, that was it. I’d been telling myself for so long I had no choice, that maybe my choice reflex had atrophied. But I could reawaken it. I could let him live. By walking away, I would prove that Dox and I were no threat to him. He’d have no incentive to come after us after that.

It made sense. I could do this. It was up to me. My choice. Everything would be possible. A thousand new directions. I thought about how I would tell Delilah, how she had been right, and how much her confidence had meant to me, how much it had helped me. I would tell her…

The phone! Not his sister, he’s detonating the bomb!

Without any other thought, I brought the gun up and shot him in the face. Again. Three times. He jerked and twitched and dropped the phone.

I sat there dumbly for a long moment in the sudden silence, the rain beating a steady drumbeat on my arms and shoulders. A tendril of smoke curled coyly from the muzzle of the gun.

I stood and picked up the mobile. I checked the screen. An access code, then 1, for America, 212, for New York…and six more digits. Christ, he’d been one digit away.

But was it the bomb? Or did he really have…

It didn’t matter. For all I knew, Boaz was elbow deep in the device right now. If Hilger had detonated it, Boaz would have died. Even if I was wrong, I had no choice.

The rain beat harder. And through the echo of that sodden drumbeat, I thought I heard a whispered voice, at once familiar and distant.

No choice.

I stood there in the cold and dark and rain. I’d known, at some level, of the possible danger if he made a call. But I’d let him make it anyway. Because once he had the phone in his hands, I had…

No choice.

My mobile buzzed. I looked and saw that it was Boaz.

I picked up. “You okay?” I asked.

“Did you hear a boom?”

“No, I didn’t. But I wasn’t listening closely.”

He laughed. “I have a simple rule. If there’s no boom, it’s good news.”

“You disarmed it.”

“Disarmed and disabled. We’ll need experts to handle the radioactive material and make sure it’s disposed of properly, but that’s someone else’s concern.”

I started walking toward the car. Jesus, I didn’t know I had so many places that could hurt. “Whose?” I asked.

“Let’s just say Mister Boezeman is very eager for no one ever to learn of this incident. And my organization is very eager to own a Rotterdam port official. It’s going to be a beautiful friendship.”